Health Policy Reform in China: A Comparative Perspective

Most of the existing literature on health system reform in China deals with only one part of the reform process (for example, financing reform in rural areas, or the new system of purchasing pharmaceuticals), or consists of empirical case studies from particular cities or regions. This book gives a broad overview of the process of health system reform in China. It draws extensively both on the Western literature in health economics and on the experience of health care reform in a number of other countries, including the US, UK, Holland, and Japan, and compares China's approach to health care reform with other countries. It also places the process of health system reform in the context of re-orienting China's economic policy to place greater emphasis on equity and income distribution, and analyzes the interaction of the central and local governments in designing and implementing the reforms. This book will be of interest to policymakers, academics, students of health economics, health policy and health administration, and people who are interested in Chinese social policy.

Readership: Policy makers, academics, students of health economics, health policy, and health administration, and people who are interested in Chinese social policy.

Jiwei Qian is a research fellow in East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. After obtaining a BSc in Computer Science from Fudan University, China, he switched his field of study to Economics and travelled to the UK where he earned an MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He developed an interest in health economics while a graduate student in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore from where he received his PhD in 2010 after writing a dissertation on health policy in China. His subsequent research on Chinese health and social policy has been published in journals such as The China Quarterly, Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics, Singapore Economic Review, and East Asian Policy, and as contributions to several books and conference proceedings.

Dr Qian's current research interests include health economics, political economy and development economics. Most recently, he has been working on a project dealing with social policy reform in China.

Åke Blomqvist, a native of Sweden, received his PhD from Princeton University in 1971. He taught at the University of Western Ontario in Canada until 2002 when he moved to the National University of Singapore as Professor and Head of Economics. In 2009 he moved to Beijing to take up a position in the Center for Human Capital and Labor Economics Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics. Since 2011 he has resided in Ottawa, Canada where he is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Economics, Carleton University. He also is Health Policy Scholar in the C D Howe Institute, Toronto, Canada.

Blomqvist's two principal areas of research have been economics of developing countries, and economics of social policy, particularly in health care. His work in development economics included stints of teaching and research in West Africa, Pakistan, and India. In recent years, his research has focused on health policy and health system reform in China and Canada, and together with his graduate students and other co-authors he has published articles, book chapters, and reports, on these topics.